Matt Ettus has the sly smile of someone who sees the invisible. His hands fly over the boards of his Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, snapping them together with an antenna like Lego ...

GNU technology could revolutionize the development of receiving equipment for SETI (and for radio astronomy in general.) It promises to speed the design of new receivers, and to allow scientists to ...

My article “GNU Radio: Tools for Exploring the Radio Frequency Spectrum” [LJ, June 2004] provides an overview of how the GNU Radio system works and discusses a couple hardware options for getting the ...

Software radio is the technique of getting code as close to the antenna as possible. It turns radio hardware problems into software problems. The fundamental characteristic of software radio is that ...

If you've never heard of software-defined radio, that may be because some might liken it to outlaw pirate-radio; it's a wild-west wireless device which will, in theory, receive or transmit radio data ...

IMAGINE AN INFINITELY flexible radio. Simply by loading in various free programs, you could turn the device into a multistandard mobile phone, a GPS locator, an AM-FM stereo receiver or even a ...

The SETI Institute and GNU Radio are officially joining forces to continue work already underway for signal processing at the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at the Hat Creek Radio ...

Your kid has a toy remote control fire truck. You have an RTL SDR. See where this is going? [Jacob] couldn’t resist tearing into the why and how of the truck’s remote control protocol. The entire ...

With the profusion of cheap RTL-SDR devices and the ever-reducing prices of more capable SDRs there might seem to be little place left for the low-bandwidth devices we’d have been happy with a decade ...